Abigail Forsyth, 46, is the managing director of KeepCup, which makes reusable coffee cups. Born in Glasgow, she now lives in Melbourne with her husband and three children.

Growing up, I would often go to Dad’s office after school before we’d drive home together. That led to my first foray into business — his IT company was in a row of factories, so when I was 11, I made sandwiches and sold them there to buy myself rollerskates. My poor mum had to drive me down every day, but I got the skates.

Later, I trained to be a lawyer and joined a small firm in Melbourne — my dad is Scottish and we’d moved to Australia, where my mum is from, when I was little. My brother, Jamie, had moved back to the UK and called me every week with a new business idea.

Abigail Forsyth (pictured), 46, began reusable coffee cup company KeepCup with her brother nine years ago

One day, he said we should start a line of coffee shops — he’d seen Pret a Manger take off in London. I thought, why not? So we did it, setting up a chain of cafes in 1998. I’d go to work and enjoy coffee in a throwaway cup.

In 2005, I had my first child, Bess. When she was a toddler, I was watching her drink warm milk from her sippy cup and a thought struck me: I’d never dream of letting her drink from a cup that was used only once then thrown away, so why did I?

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That was my call-to-action. I decided to design reusable cups for grown-ups to combat the waste created by disposable ones.

The cups available didn’t fit coffee machines, so we came up with one that a barista could use and tweaked it until it worked.

When I set up KeepCup nine years ago, it was just me and my brother, but we sold more than 350,000 cups in our first six months. Now, we have a factory making our cups in the UK and are stocked in John Lewis, Debenhams and Selfridges.